Drummer inspires Marsalis band

Jeff "Tain" Watts, the longtime drummer in Marsalis' tightly woven quartet, was striking out to start a band of his own, and Marsalis needed to find a replacement.

"I put out a feeler to (ace drummer) Eric Harland, and he said: 'No thanks,' which I understand -- I'm a hard ass," Marsalis said.

"I was trying to find someone for my band, and all the New York drummers were working."

So Marsalis took a gamble: He decided to try out a teenage drummer from Philadelphia who hadn't yet finished high school. Considering that the neophyte would be playing alongside Marsalis, the leonine pianist Joey Calderazzo and the accomplished bassist Eric Revis, odds that the youngster would survive were not necessarily encouraging.

But Justin Faulkner, who's now all of 22 years old, quickly won wide critical acclaim and had a galvanic effect on the quartet, catching everyone by surprise -- including the seasoned musician who hired him.

"We've always kind of prided ourselves on our intensity," said Marsalis, 53. But "you grow old gradually. In sports, it's clear when you're 50 that you're not 20. And when 'Tain' left the band, and this kid joined the band, we had to face that kind of sports moment.

"He brought a fire that quite frankly only a younger person can bring. We remembered how to do it, but we just realized we weren't doing it.

"It took us a couple of gigs to get used to matching his intensity."

You can hear that ferocity in Marsalis' album "Four MFs Playin' Tunes" (2012), an especially hard-hitting session that marked Faulkner's recording debut with the band. No one has been more startled by this turn of events than Faulkner himself.

"The first time that I ever heard Branford was when I was in fifth grade, and that was the first live jazz concert that I had ever been to," said Faulkner, who still finds it a bit hard to believe that he's now a pivotal player in one of the most admired small groups in jazz.

What's strange, though, is that Calderazzo -- a bona fide keyboard giant -- doesn't get greater acclaim for his work.

"He isn't discussed as much because the focus on thinking in jazz is a false focus on innovation," Marsalis said.

"There's really a twofold discussion here. There's this idea that everybody is looking for the next innovative person, and if the person actually showed up we would be able to identify them. Even though history says we usually hate those people," added Marsalis, who's exactly right. Innovators such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Ornette Coleman and others were vilified long before they were lionized.

"And with this whole idea of innovation in music, there's this idea that studying the history of music to move forward is derided as neoclassical. So from the moment that Joey (Calderazzo) joined the band, he got kind of thrown into my camp -- the camp of the neoclassicist -- and he suddenly wasn't cool anymore."